The interracial marriage prohibition is deeply rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition. Statutes prohibiting interracial marriage were enforced in American colonies and states for more than three centuries.
The first anti-miscegenation law was enacted in Maryland in 1661. Virginia followed suit soon after. [Only Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington, D.C. never enacted anti-miscegenation laws.]
Interracial marriage was so far outside of the realm of traditional marriage in colonial America that Virginia amended its anti-miscegenation law in 1691 to banish from the community any white person who married a “negro,” “mulatto,” or Indian.
Couched in “the language of hysteria rather than legalese,” the avowed purpose of Virginia’s 1691 law was to prevent “that abominable mixture and spurious issue” of whites with blacks or Indians.
Although the first American anti-miscegenation laws were enacted in the Chesapeake Bay colonies, they quickly spread throughout the country. Massachusetts enacted an anti-miscegenation law in 1705. Pennsylvania passed its anti-miscegenation law in 1725, and Delaware enacted a similar law in 1726.
By the time of the Civil War, laws prohibiting interracial marriage covered most of the South and much of the Midwest, and they were beginning to appear in Western states.
The proponents of these laws argued that they were necessary to uphold the law of nature: “Hybridism is heinous. Impurity of races is against the law of nature. Mulattoes are monsters. The law of nature is the law of God. The same law which forbids consanguineous amalgamation; forbids ethnical amalgamation. Both are incestuous. Amalgamation is incest,” [according to Henry Hughes‘ Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical & Practical], 1968].”
Although New York State never enacted an anti-miscegenation law, interracial relations were still subject to strong taboo here and vilified in the political arena. Indeed, the term “miscegenation” was first used in an anonymous propaganda pamphlet printed in New York City in 1863.
The term was coined from two Latin words meaning “to mix” and “race.” The pamphlet advocated the “interbreeding” of the white and black races so that they would become indistinguishably mixed, claiming this was the goal of the Republican Party. The pamphlet was later discovered to be an attempt by [Confederacy supporting] Democrats to discredit Republicans.
[David G. Croly (1829-1889) was a New York journalist who coined the term”miscegenation” and promoted antagonism to civil rights. Croly was born in the city of New York and educated at New York University. He worked for the Evening Post and the New York Herald (1854–58), and became the managing editor of the New York World.]
[In 1863, during the Civil War, he co-authored the anonymous pamphlet The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, which tried to discredit the abolitionist movement and the administration of Abraham Lincoln by playing on racist fears.]
During Reconstruction, southern Democrats adopted the New York-minted term “miscegenation” and insisted on the necessity of preserving the sanctity of marriage by banning interracial marriage.
A few southern states repealed their anti-miscegenation laws during Reconstruction, but societal pressure to spurn interracial relationships remained steadfast. When white southern males regained control of their state legislatures post-Reconstruction, they promptly reinstated anti-miscegenation laws.
Southern courts rejected challenges to these revived racial restrictions and upheld the laws on the basis of long-standing tradition, “equal” application to the races, and the “logic” of prohibiting interracial marriage. For example, in 1878 the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia stated:
“The public policy of this state, in preventing the intercommingling of the races by refusing to legitimate marriages between them has been illustrated by its legislature for more than a century…. The purity of public morals, the moral and physical development of both races, and the highest advancement of our cherished southern civilization .. . all require that they should be kept distinct and separate, and that connections and alliances so unnatural that God and nature seem to forbid them, should be prohibited by positive law, and be subject to no evasion.”
Despite the proliferation of anti-miscegenation laws, opponents of interracial marriage feared that state laws were insufficient to protect the sanctity of marriage. In December 1912, Representative Seaborn Roddenberry of Georgia proposed an amendment to the United States Constitution stating, “Intermarriage between Negroes or persons of color and Caucasians … is forever prohibited.”
Leaders from around the country denounced interracial marriage, which Governor John Dix [1860-1928] of New York called “a blot on our civilization” and “a desecration of the marriage tie [that] should never be allowed” and Governor William Mann of Virginia called “a desecration of one of our sacred rites.”
Marriage Prohibitions Extended To Numerous Racial Groups
Although the first anti-miscegenation laws targeted whites and blacks, many states expanded their application to other racial groups. Twelve states prohibited marriage between whites and Native Americans.
After the mid-Eighteenth century, when people from the Far East began to immigrate to the United States, states with substantial populations of Chinese and Japanese responded by enacting anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting marriage between whites and “Mongolians.”
In 1862, Oregon passed its first anti-miscegenation law. In 1866, Oregon amended the statute to prohibit marriage between “any white person, male or female” and “any negro, Chinese, or any person having one fourth or more negro, Chinese, or Kanaka [Native Hawaiian] blood, or any person having more than one-half Indian blood.”
In 1850, California enacted a law prohibiting marriages between “white persons” and “negroes or mulattoes.” Then, in 1878, California amended its constitution to restrict the intermarriage of whites and Chinese. Shortly thereafter, the California Legislature amended the Civil Code to ban the union of “a white person with a negro, mulatto, or Mongolian.” Later, it amended the law to include ‘”members of the Malay race”‘ as well.
The breadth of anti-miscegenation laws varied from state to state, as specific racial or national groups were singled out for specific statutes reflecting the racial populations of the states.
Other states enforced their anti-miscegenation policies on the basis of judicial decisions that turned on white/non-white distinctions. For example, Virginia voided a marriage between a white person and a person of Chinese descent on the basis of that state’s statute making it “unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian.”
All told, thirty-eight states had anti-miscegenation laws in effect at one time or another. By the end of World War II, thirty states still had such statutes.
State anti-miscegenation laws were considered constitutional until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down such discrimination as an unconstitutional interference with an individual’s fundamental right to marry.
Anti-Miscegenation Laws Enjoyed Vast Popular Support
Bans on interracial marriage reflected contemporary public sentiment. In 1958, a Gallup Poll indicated that 96% of all Americans opposed interracial marriage.
In 1972-five years after the Supreme Court declared bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional-a Gallup Poll reported that 75% of all white Americans still opposed interracial marriage.
In 2000, Alabama became the last state to repeal its anti-miscegenation law, with 40% of its electorate voting to keep the prohibition on the books.
[In the landmark civil rights U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1967 Loving v. Virginia, the court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate Constitution’s the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses. Beginning in 2013, the decision was cited as precedent in U.S. federal court decisions ruling that restrictions on same-sex marriage in the United States were unconstitutional, including in the Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which has recently been under attack.]
This essay was drawn from the 2005 argument set forth by the New York County Lawyers Association and the National Black Justice Coalition, as amici curiae (a friend of the court), requesting the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division, Third Department reverse Supreme Court Justice Joseph C. Teresi’s decision that denied same-sex couples the equal right to enter into civil marriages.
Illustrations, from above: A print from Christian Walker‘s “Miscegenation Series,”1985-1988 (Studio Museum in Harlem); “The Miscegenation Ball,” a cartoon presented as part of a political hoax claiming the ball was held Lincoln Campaign headquarters in Sept 1864; a racist headline in the Denver Post, May 29, 1906; and a protest against school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1959 (Library of Congress).
Leave a Reply